The 14 Most Unintentionally Terrifying Statues in the World

Write a book or paint a painting, and who knows whether it'll still be around a few years later. But build a goddamned 100-ton bronze statue, and people will still be staring at that shit centuries from now. Which makes it all the more awesome when a sculptor creates a horrifying monument to his own insanity and gets it erected in city park or town square. Like ...

#14. Frogner Park Babyfighter (?) -- Oslo, Norway

Frogner Park in Oslo is a beautiful place. It is filled with a great number of statues that capture the beauty and grace of human anatomy in a way that has to be seen to be believed. Also, this statue of a naked man kicking the shit out of several babies.

What exactly is going on here? Is it ... symbolic of something? Or, even better, is it memorializing an actual person? Did this used to be an Olympic event, and did this guy win the gold for Norway? Did they knock off points for having his dick out?

This baffling statue actually depicts four child-shaped "genii" spirits attacking a man. Or maybe only three of them are spirits, and he just happened to be doing his daily nude baby punt when they descended on him. Really, feel free to just write your own backstory here.

#13. The Child-Eater Fountain -- Bern, Switzerland

Damn, we should have done a whole article just about baby-murder statues. The Kindlifresserbrunnen, or Child-Eater, fountain of Bern was built way back in the 16th century. And really, it looks like pretty standard fountainry when you're walking by it:

Hell, from here you can barely tell that the top depicts a man snacking on a bag of babies. Probably why the artist named it "Child Eater," just to make sure you got his point.

And we say "probably" because nobody seems to know the exact story -- whatever grand point the statue was supposed to be making has been lost to time. But the artist went all-out, from the horrified, desperate expressions of the remaining uneaten babies to the legion of armed bears that stand guard around the fountain's base ...

iStockphoto

... to the fact that at least one of them is sporting a clearly visible erection.

#12. The, Uh, Turd Monument -- Ponta Grossa, Brazil

That mind-boggling, giant turd-on-a-stick is called Cocozao. It's located in the unfortunate town of Ponta Grossa, and Google Translate tells us it's actually supposed to represent a local tree called the Araucaria pine. For reference, here's an Araucaria pine:

For the surprisingly large portion of our readers who are already packing for a pilgrimage to pay respects to the Ultimate Poop Joke, we regret to inform you that the people of Ponta Grossa finally came to their senses in 2009 and demolished the statue. As a small consolation, however, they opted to do it like this:

Via adlertech.blogspot.com"Damn kids." - God, after falling for the oldest trick in the book and stomping the fire out.

#11. The Kafka Museum Entrance -- Prague

Prague clearly wanted the museum for its greatest author, Franz Kafka, to be something special. Which is why we have the above sculpture in the courtyard. If you think it looks like they're pissing a pool in the shape of the Czech Republic, a simple look closer ...

This is the work of David Cerny, an artist hailed by half his peers as a controversial genius and scorned by the other half as an utter dickhole. This won't be his only stop on this list.

The statues' dongs are robotic, so they actually move. They piss shapes in the water, and you can also make them piss a phrase of your own by sending an SMS to a pay number. And Cerny got someone to agree to that. And by the way, this was not even his most ridiculous penis-related project. He was once very, very close to being able to make the Czech National Theatre look like this:

That piece was going to be called "Nation to Itself Forever," a 30-foot golden man ejaculating steam at random intervals. It unfortunately got canceled just prior to installation, which we assume means Cerny was forced to pay up on a bet he made to another artist years ago about just how much shit he could get away with before someone stopped writing him checks.

Fortunately, this is not Prague's only artistic tribute to Kafka. There's also this ...

#10. Man and Skull -- Prague

Yes, for some reason or another, they figured that the best way to honor Kafka was by erecting a statue featuring a giant skull getting intimate with a subservient male figure at a major tourist attraction (Prague Castle's Daliborka Tower). They say this is based on a character in Kafka's books, and although we can't call ourselves experts on Kafka, we have a hard time believing any of his major characters were ever prison-raped by Skeletor's disembodied head.

Seriously, there are some sights that are not meant to be seen when casually tourist-hiking, and one of them is definitely a bronze scrotum. Which, by the way, appears to have been crushed flat with a mallet.

#9. The Faceless Crawling Horror Babies -- Prague

If you go to the park in Prague, you'll occasionally see these big, bronze babies crawling around. OK, that's ... weird, we think, but definitely not all that insane. Oh, wait, here's more of them covering the local TV tower like ants:

Yes, who would have thought that the ultimate virtue in the 16th century was considered to be high-pressure lactation? Not you and your no-longer-in-Grandma's-will ass, that's for sure. And in case you think this was one random bad statue idea, head over to Bologna, Italy, and take a gander at the deceptively named Neptune fountain:

All right, Renaissance-period sculptor guy, that's even less biologically believable than the last one. What's wrong with your women, Europe? How the hell did any of your children make it through the breast-feeding phase?